Rep. Lamar Smith threatens to subpoena the EPA over data request

Texas Rep. Lamar Smith sent a letter to the newly confirmed Environmental Protection Agency administrator today, threatening to take formal action against the organization.

On numerous occasions, the committee Smith chairs — the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee — has requested that the EPA release documents that are used to justify Clean Air Act regulations proposed and finalized by the Obama administration.

The panel has sent six letters to the EPA and other top administration officials over the past two years without any response to the requests.

Smith charges that the EPA justifies major costly new air regulations, such as proposed limits on ozone, based on certain studies. EPA has cited these “hidden data sets” and studies more than a thousand times, said Smith.

“Given the central role of these publicly funded analyses in providing justification for major, costly EPA regulations, it is imperative that this information be open and transparent. The American people are going to be forced to foot the bill. They have a right to know whether EPA’s new rules are based on sound science or a partisan agenda,” Smith said in his latest letter to EPA.

In the following video, a member of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee questions EPA officials two years ago about the data sources used by the agency:

President Obama touted the transparency of government data in July, and Smith used the president’s claim as reasoning for the administration to “make public the data that underlies these critical taxpayer-funded studies.”

The lawmakers demanded that the EPA provide the requested data by July 31, 2013 in order to avoid a subpoena.